Funding programme: Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Action
Duration: Jan 2025 – Dec 2027
Total budget: 3,2 M€
Consortium: 15 partners from 10 European countries
Coordinator: VU Amsterdam
Showcase of a successful project
The rapidly changing political information environment raises concerns regarding the spread of disinformation, rise of hate speech, and lack of cross-cutting information. This poses challenges to democratic citizenship. To understand the impact of policy and regulations on improving democratic discourse, scientists need novel methods. Methodological challenges include proprietary data, limited external validity of experiments, and the impossibility of using societies as experimental playgrounds.
The WHAT-IF consortium includes leading academic experts in computational social sciences, computer science, political science, communication science, law, and ethics. This is complemented by non-academic partners focused on media literacy, journalism, and policy engagement. The consortium will create a simulation of the digital political information environment, based on data donation, agent-based modelling and large language models. They validate the simulation with immersive virtual field experiments and by modelling ‘what-if’ scenarios based on proposed policy interventions and regulation. Finally, a critical analysis of the whole empirical chain will give insight in the desirability and legal feasibility of simulating the political information environment.
WHAT-IF will provide insights into the role of the political information environment in shaping democratic citizenship and will contribute to effective (social) media regulation and interventions. The project will also develop novel computational social science methods: it integrates advanced AI tools with existing modelling approaches, and uses respondent-centred data collection and synthetic data to harmonize research with GDPR and other regulations.
What Wouter says about our support:
Fundament was an absolute lifesaver for me in acquiring this project. Neeltje and Linde had very valuable insights in the best way to phrase and structure the proposal. Moreover, they really helped coordinating with all the project partners, making sure we had (and stuck to) a realistic planning, and keeping me sharp on organizational matters. Finally, their work on copy-editing, illustrations and layout in the end really turned it into a clean and professional proposal. Many thanks!
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